In 1950, a similar crash with a less tragic outcome
The news that an out-of-control fire truck had careered into a Mission Hill apartment building Friday afternoon killing a firefighter sent a chill through Christina Costello.
Her grandfather narrowly escaped injury during a nearly identical hook-and-ladder truck accident near that spot on April 22, 1950, when the same company - Ladder 26 - carrying five firefighters, jackknifed and crashed into a two-family home on Mission Hill.
In both crashes, the brakes may have failed.
In Friday's crash, the firetruck slammed into a high-rise at 835 Huntington Ave.; the 1950 crash was barely a block away, at 9 Parker Hill Ave.
Lieutenant Kevin M. Kelley died instantly in the Friday crash. The driver, Robert Bernard O'Neill, was hospitalized overnight and released yesterday. Two other firefighters in the truck suffered minor injuries.
Nobody was hurt in the 1950 crash, but it became part of family legend, said Costello, 39, of South Boston, whose grandfather, Daniel J. Gallagher, then 33, was on the truck.
A 17-month-old baby girl had been taking an afternoon nap on the front porch of the home, until minutes before the firetruck plowed into it.
"It was something they never forgot," said Costello of her grandfather, a lifelong firefighter who spent most of his career with Ladder 26. He died in 1998 at age 87.
According to newspaper reports from the 1950 crash, the steep hill was slippery from an afternoon rainstorm, and Ladder 26 was returning to the station after a call at Still and Sachem streets. The driver, identified as Joseph Murphy of Roxbury, lost control of the truck about 50 yards from the Huntington and Parker Hill avenues intersection, swerved left, and smashed into the stone steps and front porch of the house, the report said.
The child, Karen Kirby, had been lifted out of her carriage on the porch 15 minutes before the crash and taken to the second-floor apartment, where the family lived, her mother, Helen, told The Boston Globe at the time. The girl's uncle, John Willette, lived on the first floor and was at a window during the collision.
"It shook the whole house," he said at the time.
During Friday's crash, Ladder 26 hurtled down Parker Hill Avenue, crossed four lanes of traffic, and smashed into the apartment building. Authorities are looking at brake failure.
Gallagher's son, Daniel G., was 2 months old at the time of the Parker Hill Avenue crash. He said by phone yesterday that his father kept press clippings of the crash in a family scrapbook.
He said his father told him the truck was unable to stop and deliberately swerved into the house, rather than speed uncontrollably onto Huntington. He said his father told him the driver applied the brakes but the truck did not stop.
"There was a lot of fear that day," he said. "That part always stayed with him."
Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com. 